Foreign Policy as an Issue Area: A Roll Call Analysis

James N. Rosenau has elaborated the issue area typology developed by Theodore Lowi in an ambitious attempt to categorize motivations, role structures, and interaction sequences which distinguish “domestic” from “foreign” issues. Lowi classified domestic issues into three areas: distribution of resources, regulation of resources, and redistribution of resources, and he equated interaction sequences in these areas with the coalition (distributive), pluralist (regulatory), and elitist (redistributive) models of the political process. The theoretical underpinning of Lowi's typology was the assumption that stable expectations develop about appropriate patterns of political competition and conflict for issues in each of these three “arenas.” The internal logic of Lowi's argument is as follows: (1) people's expectations concerning benefits to be derived from relating to others determine their choices of relationships; (2) governmental policies (outputs) determine expectations about questions of politics; (3) ergo, the type of policy at stake determines the patterning of any political relationship; a distinctive type of political relationship should characterize every major type of policy. In these arenas of power, “each arena tends to develop its own characteristic political structure, political process, elites, and group relations.” Distributive policies are easily disaggregable into small units and can be apportioned among participants in relative isolation from one another. Regulatory policies, while specific in their impact, are not so infinitely disaggregable: “regulatory policies are distinguishable from distributive in that in the short run the regulatory decision involves a direct choice as to who will be indulged and who deprived.” Redistributive policies are similar to regulatory policies insofar as individual decisions are interrelated and apply to large categories of participants, but the impact of redistributive policies on these aggregates is much greater.